Very few critics can turn the pithiness of what they write into the extended pointedness of a good speech, but Richard Morrison of The Times — that paper’s chief music critic — did just that yesterday at a conference on the provision of music education in primary schools arranged by the John Lyon’s Charity in the Wigmore Hall.

I’ve always admired the battle waged by cellist Julian Lloyd Webber on behalf of music education at secondary school level, but Richard highlighted the scandal of a recent report claiming that only half of all primary schools were adequately serviced.

And, in synch with the conference as a whole, he suggested that exposure was the key. He quoted Liz Forgan, new Arts Council chair, saying that she was hooked for life by being exposed to Tristan und Isolde at the age of six. 

I know Liz well and, while I admire her enormously, I’m not at all sure I’d want the world to be peopled by similar middle-class cultural do-gooders drenched in Wagnerian epiphanies and other over-ripe musical masturbations.
 
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Last night Whatsonstage.com Theatregoers were treated to a night of fabulous dancing, wonderful singing and magnificent costumes as we were whisked away into the world of La Cage Aux Folles at the Playhouse Theatre.

Roger Allam, having recently taken on the role of Albin, plays this tempremental but deeply kind hearted drag queen with real empathy and comedy while Philip QUast does a stunning job as patient and loving Georges. All the cagelles who can-can, twirl and leap across the stage do justice to the fascinating world of La Cage so effectively brought to life by the creative team. This evening of fun which ended in a standing ovation was followed by a Q&A which was both interesting and amusing. (more…)

I topped and tailed my weekend in the same place, with one or two of the same people.

On Friday night the National Theatre hosted the new exhibition of paintings and drawings by Antony Sher, and on Sunday the Olivier auditorium was packed for a remarkable celebration of Harold Pinter.  

Alan Rickman joined the Sher throng on a break from rehearsing his Old Times scene with Lindsay Duncan for the Pinter tribute. And Sher’s cousin, playwright of the moment Ronald Harwood, mingled with fellow South African refugees Sue McGregor, Janet Suzman and Richard E Grant before returning for his old friend Harold’s special evening.
 
If a bomb had gone off at either event, the British theatre would have had to start all over again this morning. I doubt if so many distinguished folk have ever crowded into the National over one weekend before — and there had already been a big exodus to the Tony Awards in New York where Billy Elliot has won ten gongs, one less than Spring Awakening two years ago (and about ten too many, in my view).

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A rather pleasing thought occurred to me half way through David Leveaux’s superb revival of Tom Stoppard’s brilliant Arcadia last night at the Duke of York’s: was I having to concentrate as hard on the play as the author himself?

For I remember reading somewhere that once the playwright had completed each work, so he returned all his research books to the London Library, wiped the slate clean and started all over again; in other words, he’s no more au courant with the themes and scary subject matter of Arcadia now than he was before he started out on the piece in the early 1990s.

It’s a curious thing. The play is intensely enjoyable on a line by line basis but very hard to talk about when you take one step away. In the interval, the first night crowd simply spilled on to St Martin’s Lane purring with pleasure.

Stoppard himself was smoking away in the stage door alley asking the group of friends around him, I like to think, what the hell was going on. Janet Suzman said she was dumbstruck all over again by the play, by its sheer beauty, while her great friend and  fellow actor Charles Kay fixed me with an odd look and asked if I had to go to the theatre every single night.

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The Royal Court’s Wallace Shawn season concludes with Shawn’s 1985 play Aunt Dan and Lemon. This unusual tale is told through the prism of Lemon’s memories, particularly of her Aunt Dan who is an important influence in her life. The play centres around memories of one particular summer that Aunt Dan spends with Lemon’s family expounding her views on Kissinger and telling the stories of her life in London.Jane Horrocks plays the difficult character of Lemon with real finnesse while Aunt Dan, a powerful force on stage, is brought strikingly to life by Lorraine Ashbourne. (more…)

Prior to last night’s opening of Sister Act at the Palladium (See Today’s 1st Night Photos), Whatsonstage.com theatregoers got the chance to see the show and meet cast members at our exclusive Outing last week (28 May 2009).

For the uninitiated, Whatsonstage.com Outings provide theatregoers with the opportunity to get discounted tickets to a host of top West End shows, as well as a range of accompanying benefits, from free drinks, programmes and signed posters to exclusive post-show Q&As and cast meet and greets (click here to see our forthcoming Outings). (more…)

The last time I saw Danny La Rue — at the memorial for veteran Stage editor Peter Hepple, who had worked for Dan as a publicist at his legendary Hanover Square club — he berated me along the usual lines.

“You and people like you know a lot about the theatre,” he said, “but you know nothing about entertainment.”

Admittedly he’d sunk into a post television fame sulk by then and had basked in what he saw as a campaign of rejection and antipathy with the sustained bitterness of Dirk Bogarde in his final years, but he had a point.

None of us really “got” his special relationship with the British public, or celebrated sufficiently his extraordinary stage glamour, or the beauty of his costumes, or the rich Black Velvet of his Irish vocal effervescence: Guinness and champagne.

Well, maybe we did, but the last twenty years had been difficult. Lily Savage became the nation’s favourite drag queen, and she was a bit of a slut. Dan the Man — he was always a cock in a frock — was a vision you could reference to a few of his closest friends: Diana Dors, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlene Dietrich. I nearly said Princess Margaret, but just stopped in time.

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It’s always healthy to change the scenery of critical discourse, and I spent a rewarding weekend discussing festivals with critics and scholars in Novi Sad, about one hundred kilometres from Belgrade: the audiences, the politics, the funding and the future.

If that sounds a bit dry, I can promise you it wasn’t. We had papers and fulminations from Athens and Turin, Cape Town and Toronto, Bratislava and Dortmund, and Vermont.

Vermont? Well yes, and nothing to do with a White Christmas, either. Nice chap called Bill Reichblum told us that cultural tourism was on the rise over frivolous travel. Apparently, in harder times, people want vacations with bottom, and they may not even be packing the beach wear.

What were termed “high-heeled” festivals are so over; it’s now all about finding new places with new spaces and energising the local community.

But one delegate said that, where he lived in the Ruhr area, there was a big boom in the furniture industry: people were buying nice new sofas so that they didn’t feel too bad about not going out, which costs money (so do the sofas, but I assume they’ve done the math).

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